Business Process Management (BPM), Workflow Tutorials

What is Business Process Management - BPM?

Business Process Management or BPM, is the practice of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of any organization by automating the organization's business processes. BPM used to be also know as Business Process Reengineering (BPR).

Many companies have business processes that are unique to its business model. Since these processes tend to evolve over time as the business reacts to market conditions, the BPM solution you choose must be easily adaptable to the new conditions and requirements and continue to be a perfect fit for the company.

In order to use BPM effectively, organizations must stop focusing exclusively on data and data management, and adopt a process-oriented approach that makes no distinction between work done by a human and a computer.

• The idea of BPM is to bring processes, people and information together.
• Dynamic infrastructure requires separation of flows, business rules and services.
• Identifying the business processes is relatively easy. Breaking down the barriers between business areas, and finding owners for the processes is difficult.
• BPM not only involves managing business processes within the enterprise but also involves real-time integration of the processes of a company with those of its suppliers, business partners, and customers.
• BPM involves looking at automation horizontally instead of vertically.
• Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is essential for measurement of BPM impact.

Examples of BPM tasks that your organization performs that should be automated include:

• Expense Reports Travel Requests
• Purchase Orders Human Resource Management
• New Accounts and Credit Authorizations Sales Orders
• Project Management Software Change Management

The following example illustrates the power of BPM:

When a B2B partner needs some inventory, he can log into the web site and order required inventory. An email will be generated and sent to the supervisor responsible for the partner's inventory. The supervisor can click on the link in the email, login to the site and approve the inventory. The partner will be notified of the allocation and the inventory will be shipped.